As I lurched around the side of the house, I heard Willow talking in a singsong voice to Poe. She giggled at the loud way he crunched on the corn she was feeding him.

“Whatcha doin’, rug rat?” I asked.

After glancing at me over her shoulder, she gave me a disapproving look. It had a greater effect than she could have ever imagined. I had never felt so cut down to size by anyone, not even after Mama Beth’s talk. “Feeding Poe,” she finally replied.

“That’s nice of you, but I’m the one who does that.”

“You don’t do much of anything but drink lately,” she murmured softly.

Fuck me. She might as well have knifed me in the chest. I didn’t know what to say to her. Finally, I settled on, “I’m sorry, rug rat.”

After tossing the rest of Poe’s corn to the ground, she turned to face me. “My first mommy used to tell me she was sorry. But then she would go right back to drinking.” She stomped her pink-sneakered foot dramatically, and then swept her hands to her hips. “I don’t want you to be like her, Uncle Rev. I don’t want you to hurt people like she did. . . I don’t want you to hurt me.”

While I had expected her to be the one crying, I was the one whose eyes became moist. Christ, where had I gone so wrong? I had once been a hero in Willow’s eyes. Now she was disgusted and disappointed by me. She was just another woman whom I had loved and had alienated myself from.

“Do you want to know why Poe comes back for the corn?”

Swiping my eyes with the back of my hands, I muttered, “Because he’s a spoiled brat.”

Willow shook her head. “He comes back because he knows we want to take care of him. He could survive out there with his deer friends, and maybe he would be better off, but he still wants to see us. We show him we still love him by leaving him the corn.”

I blinked at her. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected that she was trying to make some strange correlation between Annabel and Poe. She didn’t give me a knowing look like Mama Beth might, or Alexandra. She just appeared to be talking from her heart.

And it was time for me to start talking from mine.

SEVENTEEN

ANNABEL

Four months, three days, and nineteen hours. That’s how long it had been since I had seen or even spoken to Rev Malloy. While he had tried to reach me by phone, I had refused his calls. He had wounded me too deeply at a time when I was at my most vulnerable. After what I had been through with Mendoza, I couldn’t have imagined ever going through something worse. But I was wrong. Having the man you care deeply for question your feelings for him and allude to your being crazy was just as bad. Maybe it was even worse because of the additional element of being kicked when you were already down.

The rational part of me understood why Rev had done what he did. Deep down, I had questioned the root of my feelings for him. Did I want to be with him because of who he truly was or because he was my savior? Was he just the safe choice after what I had been through? Was it some weird reversal of Stockholm syndrome? Of course, Rev could never be compared to a monster like Mendoza. He might’ve been a tough biker who had made some choices I might not understand, but I knew that at his core he had a heart of gold.

But regardless of the time, distance, personal reflection, and therapy I allowed myself, the answer remained the same. While it defied all reason and made no sense, I had fallen in love with Nathaniel “Reverend” Malloy.

“Annabel? Are you up here?” My mother’s voice broke through my clouded thoughts.

“Yes. I am.”

She appeared in my doorway, bedecked in the finest of couture gowns along with some of our family jewels. She then bestowed upon me her usual disapproving look—the one strictly reserved for me. “What are you doing still up here? You should be downstairs greeting guests.”

I rose from my vanity chair as best I could in my formal gown. “I’m sorry. I was just finishing with my makeup. I’ll be right down.”

“I should expect so.” She turned and flounced out into the hallway. With a resigned sigh, I started across my bedroom. It had been my refuge in the months since returning home. Moving back in with my parents was practically a fate worse than death, but my parents insisted on it. Allegedly, it was the best way for my father’s hired protection to keep an eye on me. I think it was more about getting his money’s worth from the security detail—and what better way to do that than to have them stationed at the house?

A bodyguard followed me wherever I went, which these days consisted of home and my job at the veterinarian’s office I had worked at during my undergraduate program. I would be returning to vet school at the University of Virginia in January. Between my captivity and my time with Rev, I had missed the beginning of the semester.

These days I rarely went out socially. While my friends had reached out to me after my return, I found spending any time with them to be awkward. The fact I had been a sex slave was always a dark specter hanging over any lunchtime gathering or movie night. There was also the fact that I wasn’t the same girl I had been six months ago, and in many ways I had outgrown some of them. The sorority-sister hijinks I had once reveled in now seemed childish.

As I made my way to the top of the massive, winding staircase adorned with Christmas garland, the sounds of the party threatened to overwhelm me. The mindless chatter coupled with the jazzy Christmas carols from the band grated on my nerves. It took everything within me to will my Christian Louboutin heels forward. Every fiber of my being wanted to run back to the safety of my bedroom. Of course, if I had my way, I would have preferred being at the Raiders compound with Rev, Mama Beth, Alexandra, and Willow.